Birdsville might be the most remote town in Queensland but has a mystique of its own and is one of the most well-known places in the outback. The annual races and the Big Red Bash attract thousands every year. Birdsville is 1600km from Brisbane while Adelaide is slightly closer at 1500km. The road from South Australia, the Birdsville Track, was perhaps most responsible for creating the legend of Birdsville. The story of the Track and one man who used it was the subject of a 1950s film Back of Beyond. That film was an unexpected hit and a national favourite for many years. It made stars of the Track and of Australia’s own “Tom Cruise”, though in his case it was spelt Tom Kruse and he was an outback postman who pre-dated Cruise by many years.
Back of Beyond is worth checking out despite the plummy narrator who tells how the bush postie grinds his way forward, his truck filled with necessities and news for the Outback. The rough desert track is covered in sandhills. In places the passengers get out and place iron sheets (left there for this purpose) under bogged tyres so the truck can escape the sand. It revs in circles to speed up and climb over tricky sandhills.
Among many memorable scenes, Kruse’s battered hat and craggy face is unmissable. Tom Kruse spent just 20 of his 96 years as the Birdsville postie but this role defined him. Kristin Weidenbach tells Kruse’s story in Mailman of the Birdsville Track (2003). Weidenbach introduces herself as “the daughter of the chief Badger restorer Neil Weidenbach”. The Badger was a Leyland truck Kruse used to deliver the mail and Weidenbach met Kruse through her father. Still spry in his eighties, Kruse was an inveterate talker and had an astonishing memory.
Kruse was born in 1911 at Waterloo, South Australia, 120km north of Adelaide. From a family of 12 children, Kruse left school at 13 and did odd jobs, getting valuable lessons in bush repairs and mechanical improvisation. In the Depression he moved 200km north to Yunta on the Barrier Hwy where he was a mechanic for his uncle. He then got a job with carter Harry Ding, hauling livestock, wheat and wool.
Ding owned Northern SA mail runs and successfully bid for the Marree-Birdsville route in 1935. The two towns were linked by the Birdsville Track, a dry, lonely and ill-defined cattle trail. Founded in the 1880s to move stock from the Channel Country to southern markets, the Track was 500 kilometres of “blinding sunlight glinting off orange gibber stones, eerie desert darkness and palpable silence”. It was full of flies, choking dust storms and sand that clogged air filters. The new service was a threat to the Afghan cameleers that dominated the supply of goods along the route (though the mail had always gone by horse).
Though he had never driven the track, Kruse was Ding’s most competent driver and natural choice for the new run. Ding proposed a one week route every second week: three days north, one day in Birdsville and three days back. In the off weeks there were other jobs. Kruse started in 45 degree heat on New Year’s Day 1936. Driving a six-wheeled Leyland Cub, Kruse carried the mail and five passengers, three clinging precariously on top of the load.
The Track passed windswept sandhills and hard claypans, often just two faint tyre trails needing local knowledge to decipher. After camping overnight at Cooper Creek, they met the first of the fearsome sandhills at Ooroowillanie. At the bottom of the hill, the passengers got off, Kruse laid down coconut matting, reversed the truck and charged at the dune. Halfway up it slid off the matting and he had to start again. It took several goes to get over the top and the mats were torn to shreds.
He made it to Birdsville amid great excitement from townsfolk keen to see their fortnightly mail and the new truck. They wrote replies for Harry to take home the following day. There were also new passengers for the journey back.
The first round trip was trouble-free but the desert quickly took its toll. On the second trip a universal joint snapped forcing Kruse to walk 9kms to a station, then 45km by horse and foot to another station where he borrowed a Dodge to complete the run. The Cub was stuck for weeks awaiting parts. While it was out of action he used Ding’s 1934 Ford which twisted an axle in the middle of nowhere. With no radios, it took days for Ding to realise Kruse had not reached Birdsville. He sent a mission to find them at Goyder Lagoon. After that they equipped the trucks with radios to report progress.
Kruse adapted to the conditions but in the wet season when the rivers rose and cut the track, a seven-day trip could last six weeks. Kruse used two vehicles, one either side of the swollen Cooper Creek, and a boat to ferry cargo between them. In 1936 Ding bought a more reliable Leyland Badger. He improved it in 1939 with a gearbox and rear axle from an abandoned Thorneycroft which gave better performance in the sand. It lacked brakes but they were a “decorative accessory” in the desert.
Kruse and the overladen Badger were famous on the Track by 1942. He was 27 and married Valma, whom he courted for five years. Ding made him manager in Marree where the couple set up home. Valma accompanied him on the Birdsville run, sleeping in the open, until the birth of their first daughter in 1943. The road improved but iron sheets were still needed to cross bigger sandhills. When coming from the west, there was a near-vertical drop from the top so Kruse had to be at the right speed to slide down the eastern side.
The half way point was Mungerannie Gap where the country changed from sandhills to the pebbly gibber plains of the Sturt Stony Desert. Kruse called it a never-ending paddock of marbles, constantly jolting and shuddering through flying stones. They caused numerous punctures which were fixed with a hand pump that took 1000 strokes to reach pressure.
In 1947 Kruse bought the mail run from Ding. Flood years followed and it was almost impossible to make money while the Cooper Creek was up, often for six months. Instead of one vehicle and one or two men, Kruse needed three men and two vehicles. By the third year of flood in 1951 Kruse had enough. He rented the mail run to another man while he started a dam-sinking business (though he didn’t sell the run until 1963). The track quality improved and a new four-wheel Blitz was more suited to the desert terrain than the six-wheelers of Kruse’s era. The Badger became Kruse’s runabout.
A year later, John Heyer, working for the Shell Film Unit, arrived in the outback to make a film about “the spirit of Australia”. The Marree-Birdsville mail run was ideal for his project. It was a heavily scripted docu-drama and the mailman represented all the hard-working pioneers of the inland. When Heyer met Kruse he immediately knew he was right for the role.
Kruse brought the Badger to filming of Back of Beyond in 1952. Kruse, Heyer and a ten person crew left Marree in four 4WD vehicles carrying generators, radios, wind machines and three months of food. They recreated hazards of the mail run, filming a dust storm at Etadunna station using an old aeroplane engine with a huge propeller. They had Kruse fall from the boat on the creek crossing, a hazardous undertaking as he could not swim.
In the most famous scene, Kruse dances with a dressmaker’s dummy on the banks of the Cooper, doffing his hat to an imaginary partner. Kruse was not paid for his acting but it changed his life. The film premiered in Adelaide in 1954 and was an immediate hit. Though the sound tapes were scratched in the desert and actors overlaid the voices of Kruse and others, he and Valma (who appeared briefly, calling him for dinner) loved it when it played in Marree to great applause and laughter.
The critics loved it too. The Sydney Morning Herald called it a masterpiece in “an environment that will not compromise with man”. It was good PR for Shell who toured the film across Australia packing out halls. Young Queen Elizabeth saw Back of Beyond on her Royal Yacht in 1954. She was so impressed she added Kruse to the 1955 New Year’s honour’s list as an MBE. By 1960 more people had seen Back of Beyond than any other Australian film. Schools borrowed it and a generation was mesmerised by the Australian desert and envied Kruse’s lifestyle, even though he was no longer living it.
Kruse’s dam-sinking career was just as arduous and required many months on the road. After innumerable breakdowns and bush repairs, the Badger was used as a water truck but in 1958 it met its end at Pandie Pandie station in north-east SA. The engine died but the tray was still useful as a platform to store fuel drums. The Badger slowly sunk to the ground, seemingly abandoned to its fate.
The family moved to Adelaide in the 1960s though Tom still roamed the inland working on dams. He retired in 1984 aged 70. Two years later South Australia was celebrating 150 years and among the festivities planned was a ride from Port Augusta to Birdsville. It included a re-enactment of the mail run with Kruse driving a 1950s Chevy Blitz.
The reenactment involved 80 vehicles. After getting to Birdsville they went back 50km to Pandie Pandie and found the Badger next to an abandoned Cub. The Badger was a wreck but they rescued the Cub. Kruse always believed he could rescue the Badger but others did it without his knowledge in 1993. A group including Neil Wiesenbach carefully extracted the old truck skeleton. After Kruse got over his shock and disappointment, he joined the loving restoration project in Adelaide.
A film crew heard about it and decided on one last trip in 1999. The film The Mail Truck’s Last Run raised funds for the Flying Doctors. An official re-enactment convoy left Birdsville for Marree with Kruse driving. They camped at the Cooper for an auction to raise money and a screening of Back of Beyond. The Badger was not up to the journey, making most of it on a truck and wheeled out for the entry into Birdsville at 30kph behind a banner reading “The Mail Truck’s Last Run”.
The passenger-side door and nameplate were donated to the Birdsville Museum. The rest of the Badger set off for Marree and driven for three hours before being loaded on the truck. They arrived in Marree to a hero’s welcome and Tom caught up with many he had not seen since 1963. A few days later he drove the Badger to Adelaide to officially hand it over to the mayor. The Badger ended up in the National Motor Museum at Birdwood in the Adelaide Hills.
Kruse was a celebrity for the remainder of his days. In 2000 he and the Badger starred in the National 4×4 show in Melbourne. In 2001 there was the long-awaited screening of Last Mail from Birdsville. Wiesenbach’s book came out two years later. Tom Kruse died aged 96 in 2011. In ABC’s report of his death, governor-general Michael Jeffery said Kruse had saved many lives during his Outback days. “I think we use the term hero far too frequently when it doesn’t really apply, but I think in this case it does,” he said.
Woolly Days 